Friday Mar 15, 2013

A new article by Björn Müller, now up on otn/java, titled “Why, Where, and How JavaFX Makes Sense” incisively explores the intricacies of when, where, and how JavaFX is a good technology fit.

Müller writes: “Our experience proves that implementing an employee desktop front end with native technology is a valid approach and that JavaFX is a good fit.

* JavaFX is available on the leading desktop operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X)* Although it has gone through some painful changes, its evolution proves its vendor’s level of commitment.* As the successor to Swing, it is being used by an increasing number of Java developers. Regardless of its future, it will benefit from a strong developer community.* Compared to Swing, it provides a clear and clean architecture and features many enhancements: styling, event management, transitions, scene graph—to name a few.* It provides the possibility of developing up-to-date user interfaces with animations, multitouch, and the like.* It is based on a clear and clean language: Java.* It provides all the professional Java tooling required to debug, analyze, profile, and log a client application.* It enables a simple app-like installation on the client side, without any prerequisites.”

Müller provides a nuanced discussion of the kinds of architecture in which JavaFX should be embedded, its uses with JavaServer Faces, and reports on his own experiences using JavaFX.

Thursday Sep 27, 2012

Raghavan Srinivas, affectionately known as “Rags,” is a two-time JavaOne
Rock Star (from 2005 and 2011) who, as a Developer Advocate at
Couchbase, gets his hands dirty with emerging technology directions and
trends. His general focus is on distributed systems, with a
specialization in cloud computing. He worked on Hadoop and HBase during
its early stages, has spoken at conferences world-wide on a variety of
technical topics, conducted and organized Hands-on Labs and taught
graduate classes.

He has 20 years of hands-on software
development and over 10 years of architecture and technology evangelism
experience and has worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun
Microsystems, Intuit and Accenture. He has evangelized and influenced
the architecture of numerous technologies including the early releases
of JavaFX, Java, Java EE, Java and XML, Java ME, AJAX and Web 2.0, and
Java Security.

Rags will be giving these sessions at JavaOne 2012:

CON3570 -- Autosharding Enterprise to Social Gaming Applications with NoSQL and Couchbase

Rags emphasized the importance of the Cloud: “The Cloud and
the Big Data are popular technologies not merely because they are
trendy, but, largely due to the fact that it's possible to do massive
data mining and use that information for business advantage,” he
explained.

I asked him what we should know about Hadoop.
“Hadoop,” he remarked, “is mainly about using commodity hardware and
achieving unprecedented scalability. At the heart of all this is the
Java Virtual Machine which is running on each of these nodes. The vision
of taking the processing to where the data resides is made possible by
Java and Hadoop.”

And the most exciting thing happening in the
world of Java today? “I read recently that Java projects on github.com
are just off the charts when compared to other projects. It's exciting
to realize the robust growth of Java and the degree of collaboration
amongst Java programmers.”

He encourages Java developers to take advantage of Java 7 for Mac OS X which is now available for download. At the same time, he also encourages us to read the caveats.